The Role of Linguistic Complexity in Fan Fiction

Fan Fiction Community

Fan fiction community involves textual realization of intensive emotional attachment of the fans’ aim to cult popular culture’s products. Initially, fan fiction incorporated local practices such as fandoms of football teams as well as local bands, but it currently involves discourses and writing styles that include flows and exchanges across groups who might be separated geographically (Leavenworth 41). Fan fiction involves strong mediated cult texts as well as active textual and cultural work from fans that is expressed through bricolage, quotation, hybridity as well as the restructuring of discourse stretches produced or shared between websites and forums that are created and monitored by fans (Gray, Cornel and Lee 27). The primary audience is fans, who are able to get emotional fulfillment, creativity, and play. Fans also enjoy opportunities for appropriations that are subversive and critical.

Writing and Sharing of Football Fan Fiction

The writing and sharing of football fan fiction on the website is a fundamental form of cultural as well as social capital. However, for the football fans to write and appreciate fan fiction, they require specific and detailed knowledge which is acquired by participating in literacy practices that involve fan cultures. According to Leavenworth, the text in fan fiction should demonstrate that the writer has adequate expertise in rearticulating cult texts (46). The linguistic style used involves shared communicative, interactive and discursive approaches that aim at maintaining membership in fan whether online or offline. The group also consists of unwritten rules to ensure that members demonstrate social parameters through blogs, discussion, or images (Schwabach 15). The writing and reading of fan fiction show elements of elective sociality that is critical in transforming the group from a specific aesthetic way of life to provide the basis for constructing identity.

Language and Genre in Fan Fiction

The language used in fan fiction is shaped by the audience who are also football fans with full control of the forum. The text incorporates strategic use of genres and genre conventions to re-textual cult texts and attracts the attention of audiences as well as satisfying their expectations (Gray, Cornel and Lee 18). The most common fan fiction genre is a romance that may be generated from novels, short stories action, poems, action, drama, songs, and fantasy. The text may also incorporate mixed genres within the fan fiction community that include songfics, angst romances as well as cross-over fan fiction. The linguistic complexity is critical in fan fiction to ensure that audiences are appreciating the craft. Moreover, paratextual glosses are used to clarify the complexity of text (Leavenworth 48). The text may not have room for speculation but may provide explicit gloss to the readers.

Stylistic Devices in Fan Fiction

Another stylistic device used in fanfiction is the mobilization of diverse textual resources and development of complex intertextuality to manipulate familiar aspects and create literary genres. According to Schwabach, the text may incorporate different formats of web genres to establish generic features of presenting game show (17). Fan fiction would be based on young people’s language that is transgressive and playful in nature, which uses slang, colloquialisms, and jargon to challenge other members or fans (Gray, Cornel and Lee 14).

Use of Language in Fan Fiction

The works selection would ensure that the text can be used non-English speakers since it does not incorporate local language phrases or language mixing. However, the use of more than one language is motivated by the genre of the messages being conveyed as well as the culture of the character. The application of conforming language encourages socialization among members since a member is able to acquire unique status and affiliations that are critical in social spaces.

Works Cited

Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds. Fandom: Identities and communities in a mediated world. NYU Press, 2017.

Leavenworth, Maria Lindgren. “The paratext of fan fiction.” Narrative 23.1 (2015): 40-60.

Schwabach, Aaron. Fan fiction and copyright: outsider works and intellectual property protection. Routledge, 2016.